Valve denies Steam Box rumours

Valve's Doug Lombardi has dismissed rumours that Valve is developing its own PC or console hardware.

Earlier this week we heard that Valve was developing the "Steam Box", a console-PC hybrid used to play Steam and other PC games through your TV.

However, Lombardi says that's not the case, and suggests rumours may have arisen from the development boxes Steam uses to test software internally.

"We're prepping the Steam Big Picture Mode UI and getting ready to ship that, so we're building boxes to test that on," he told Kotaku.

Steam Big Picture is software designed to allow Steam games to appear perfectly on TV screens, but it doesn't include its own hardware.

"We're also doing a bunch of different experiments with biometric feedback and stuff like that, which we've talked about a fair amount. All of that is stuff that we're working on, but it's a long way from Valve shipping any sort of hardware," he continued.

"We're always putting boxes together. Going all the way back to the Half-Life 1 days, we built special boxes to test our software render... it's just part of development."